- flip flopping on mask policy
- surface transmission
- vaccine efficacy
- herd immunity
- natural immunity
- gain of function
I'm not going to argue whether or not this was best course of action, because there's no way to know what the alternate reality would look like.
It is however an interesting revelation about the character of our leaders.
In their mind, the ends justify the means, in so far as they unilaterally define both the ends and the means. Who knows what else they lie about for the "greater good".
Can you point out what was in your opinion the best example of what you described as "noble lie"?
I've seen people throwing baseless accusations by misrepresenting basic guidances, such as how avoiding scarcity of personal safety equipment like latex gloves and surgical masks in hospitals was distorted into "first they state masks don't work but now they flipflop into arguing they do".
Thus, to avoid personal subjective takes and keep this discussion on the facts, what exactly do you see as the best example of this "noble lie"?
Many countries acknowledge it as a valid alternative to the vaccine. But not the USA. There has been no change in policy. Not even a public acknowledgment, let alone an apology for getting it wrong.
Is this out of ignorance? malice? Neither, it's simply pragmatic.
Reliably testing for prior infections at population scale would be really slow, expensive, and faulty. Further there's no real downside to vaccinating someone with a prior infection (slightly higher incidence of side effects notwithstanding).
Further, people will lose the urgency to get the vaccine if they think they have antibodies.
Monolithic policy is cheaper than nuanced policy, and monolithic policy only works if its dead simple. So, better to have everyone believe the vaccine is the one and only solution than to actually concern themselves with the truth.
There are also many examples of "verbatim" lies, such as these:
https://www.businessinsider.com/who-says-no-evidence-coronav...
> Moderna's chief medical officer, Tal Zaks, said last month that he believed it was likely the vaccine would prevent transmission but warned that there was not yet "sufficient evidence" of it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/health/coronavirus-vaccin...
> The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday walked back controversial comments made by its director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, suggesting that people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus never become infected or transmit the virus to others.
What exactly do you mean by "works"?
I mean, it's well established that those who contract COVID and didn't died from it will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.
But that is not the point of a vaccine, is it?
The point of the vaccine is that it trains your immune system to fight an infection without undergoing the risk of a real infection. So that the odds you die from COVID are lower, if not residual.
Consequently, we see the bulk of all deaths from COVID comprised of unvaccinated individuals.
But other than all the dead, those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.
Is that what you mean by "Natural immunity works"? That if you ignore all those unvaccinated people who died then the ones that lived through a COVID infection didn't died?
Because the whole point of a vaccine is that people don't have to die from a preventable disease, isn't it?
Let me make it easy:
1. majority of infections happened pre-vaccine rollout.
2. we created a system that locked people out based on vaccine status.
3. the system should have included those with natural immunity.
/q
There is no nuance. The message couldn't be clearer: if you take the vaccine then the odds you'll die from COVID are way lower than if you do not.
And reality does not lie: the bulk of COVID deaths come from unvaccinated people.
https://www.factcheck.org/2022/04/scicheck-covid-19-data-com...
Enough with all this misinformed or disinformed bullshit.
> it's well established that those who contract COVID .. will have a good immunity response for subsequent infections.
> those who survive a COVID infection do end up with an immune system that is able to handle COVID.
It seems like we're on the same page here.
i.e let's lie and say natural immunity does _not_ work, that way people are more likely to get vaccinated. It's for their own good, the common folk don't know any better!
Look at Japan and Russia. Japan was highly compliant with lockdowns, masks, and vaccine inoculation. Russia was the exact opposite. The difference being trust in institutions. You could argue lives were lost in Russia because of the inherent distrust.
In parallel, the USA was caught telling blatant lies. This is exactly what spooked and outraged so many people ultimately fueling the anti-vax movement. "If they're lying about this, what else are they lying about?"
No truth, no trust. The USA lost trust, and lost lives as a result.
Many more people would have skipped out on getting it because they thought they had COVID. Because their immunity had waned or because they never really had COVID. I personally know someone that didn't get vaccinated because she had COVID previously. She caught it again in the Delta wave and it killed her. She never had a verified diagnosis the first time, so she may not have had it. But, even if she did, getting vaccinated would have likely boosted her immunity.
The former is clearly not true with regards to COVID. That is why we have been having waves of high infection rates, as the new variants get quickly distributed widely.
Have you seen how bad Sweden's numbers were? It was vaunted as a story of the success of let it rip approach, but the end result was to show the failure of the let it rip approach.
And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed. The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
The immune system doesn't "lock onto“ part of the virus. That's just misinformation and displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the adaptive immune system works.
Reality does not agree with you.
Sweden fared rather poorly when compared with comparable countries such as Norway, Finland, or Denmark.
* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/norway/
* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/finland/
* https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/denmark/
There is no way around it: Sweden had more covid-related deaths than Norway, Finland, and Denmark bundled together.
Denmark had 500k more cases than Sweden, but only endured a quarter of Sweden's death count.
This does not fit the definition of "quite good". These are awful numbers. Awful numbers that were easily avoidable if Sweden followed the example of any of its neighbors.
> And note that it's not that good in the first place--plenty of reinfections because the immune system locked onto a part of the virus that changed.
You've got it exactly backwards. The vaccine uses only a part of the S-protein, whereas a natural infection exposes the body to the full S-protein and N-protein. In theory and in practice, the immune system can train on more viral features via natural infection than it can via vaccine.
> The vaccine has enough problem with immune escape, natural "immunity" fares even worse.
It really doesn't. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
> We present a systematic review and pooled analysis of clinical studies to date that (1) specifically compare the protection of natural immunity in the COVID-recovered versus the efficacy of complete vaccination in the COVID-naive ... it supports the pooled findings in finding superiority of natural immunity over-vaccination ... Consequently, no study could conclude the superiority of vaccination protection over natural immunity with statistical confidence, but observational studies endorsed an advantage for protection by natural immunity. [7]
[0] https://ycharts.com/indicators/sweden_coronavirus_full_vacci...
[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34089610/
[3] https://ncrc.jhsph.edu/research/
[4] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhl/article/PIIS2666-75...
[5] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/lasting...
[6] https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...
He found himself in a tough situation, having to tell inconvenient truths to a President that had every reason to downplay the virus because he had up to that point a very strong economy and was up for re-election in less than a year. Guess what—that’s a key part of the job for a high level government official. Politics always influences the theoretically neutral scientific agencies, and diplomatically handling such situations is essential. Trump wasn’t some singularity in this regard: he was more bombastic in his rhetoric, but the rush to normalize things in advance of an election wasn’t unique to him: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/04/ba2-omicr...
In this context, a competent public official would (1) jealously guard his credibility; and (2) assure the public that he understands that controlling the pandemic isn’t the only thing people care about. Fauci has consistently failed to do either. He made assertions about masking, natural immunity, and schools that we’re ill-advised and turned out to be wrong. And he has shown no ability to convey to the public that he understands the balancing of competing social interests. With him, it’s always about the most cautious approach.
Fauci is a good illustration of why it’s dangerous to put wonks in public-facing leadership positions. There’s an argument that someone in Fauci’s position should just focus on the most cautious possible approach and leave the balancing of competing policy interests to elected officials. But in a pandemic, the public will look to health officials for leadership and guidance. They’re not just in the back room crunching numbers for the political decision makers.
I think Fauci is hyper political, he's just not optimizing for truth but for institutional staying power. And it worked! America suffered the consequences, but he held onto his job and half the U.S. worships him.